Building (or vibecoding) a markdown editor for a single user and their specific use case, for a 100 users, and for 10,000 users takes different amount of time and effort. In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of users.
Today on /r/macapps/ there’s a wave of apps that look good at the first glance but get abandoned before they achieve even a 100-users maturity level.
Lots of people threw small apps on their Github accounts for their own convenience in having a backup, and in case other people might be interested, but realistically never expected to get one more user. I have several scripts, Chrome extensions, and the like in my Github that fit that description. The difference is that coding agents let you write a one-user app at a much larger scale than before.
> In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of user
And then put it on an app store and put all the vital features behind $15/mo subscription.
Which is totally justified! I understand the time and energy needed to get a product polished for 10,000 users. But thanks, I will take my vibe coded one.
Contrastingly, Minimal (minimal.app) is a markdown notes app made by me for me (for one person!) improved to support 100 thoughtful writers, improved again to support thousands, then tens of thousands… now 6 years later I continue to ship meaningful updates (OS parity, new features, better designs for existing features, greater stability and performance, and occasionally entirely new patterns).
What made the difference? For one thing, I know better than to ignore the future. A small success in 2020 was like a seed planted amidst an infinite future, and I knew to water the seed. Secondly, I continue prioritize this fulcrum between complexity and utility, where the app gets better by getting simpler wherever possible (most people neglect this fulcrum as not offering much “business opportunity,” failing to realize it is the foundation of all business opportunities). Finally, I just love it, and appreciate that others love it too.
(For those interested, you’re welcome to join the beta at minimal.app/#beta on Apple devices and contribute to the roadmap.)
i mean, sure. but the point is, you yourself are often a solo user of these little productivity apps. if you're not using team-based features then a lot of these things aren't worth paying for.
Thanks for finding a steel‑man way to interpret it. That is such a bizarre narrative choice I didn't even consider it. So they used that arrow notation consistantly to refer to the headings, representing the order of magnitude of money, the entire article, which was a great idea. Then for some baffling and unknowable reason, they decided to inform us that a count of people can also be expressed as a power of ten using the same notation.
seeing how much power shifted from legislative branch to executive, and how often executive branch changes its mind, I wouldn’t count on the unwavering government support
does anyone know how would e-ink compare to oldschool reflective TN LCD displays (those in Casios from the nineties)? I have a Playdate device with this type of screen and it seems pretty cool, I wonder why so few devices today are taking advantage of it.
Transflective LCD screens ("e-paper") compete with e-ink currently.
Monochrome e-ink has a better resolution and contrast ratio than old-school LCD devices (I'm comparing my experiences with a Palm Pilot in the 1990s and an Onyx BOOX in the 2020s). LCD can refresh far faster, in the 100+ / 100s Hz range, where typical e-ink refresh rates in my experience have been in the single-digit to low-double-digit Hz range (video is doable but far from ideal).
E-ink also displays quite nicely with a "frontlight", which brightens the background (whiter whites) without washing out the foreground (print/ink). Illuminated LCD displays tend to wash out the dark fields, though I've not viewed e-paper directly and cannot speak to that.
TFA is describing a far higher e-ink refresh rate than I've experienced directly.
I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.
The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.
1. the airfare inflation chart is based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI which is calculated differently from the other metrics in the article; it does take into account routes popularity.
2. today’s average Economy ticket is different from the 1990s ticket: meals, seat pitch, seat selection, baggage. service changed to the point that 1990 Standard Economy is more similar to 2025 Premium Economy.
I wonder how modern models fair on NovelQA and FLenQA (benchmarks that test ability to understand long context beyond needle in a haystack retrieval). The only such test on a reasoning model that I found was done on o3-mini-high (https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.21318), it suggests that reasoning noticeably improves FLenQA performance, but this test only explored context up to 3,000 tokens.
I’m curious what the policy with the highest long-term benefit would be. The country needs external talent, but would skewing H-1B towards high skill be good? The economy seems to need unskilled labor for the jobs Americans are not interested in. Should the government try to curb hi-tech outsourcing instead, to create more jobs in the States, both for the citizens and the skilled immigrant workers? But that would be protectionism, and protectionism rarely play out well economically.
Ask the countless unemployed and underemployed CS and CE and EE grads. They have a simple answer: give them a job first.
Until local grads are fully employed, H1B should be limited to a fixed and equal amount per country per year. That’s fair. No more Indian managers hiring only Indian H1Bs. If they need the foreign talents so much let them hire some Irish or South Korean H1Bs.
they forgot to add “Can’t wait to see what you do with it”